With AI now dominating headlines, those who have been discussing artificial intelligence for decades must be blown away by the strangeness of the narrative. However, that fragmentation and bewilderment is perhaps what many indeed expected to see. Nick Land appears one of the most prescient in his argument that capitalism already is a self-improving, automated machine. Here, philosopher Vincent Lê explores Land's apparently wild claims, exploring their truth and consequence.

The philosopher Nick Land is notorious for the many rumors, legends, and controversies that surround him: from his mysterious occult practices as part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) that culminated in a drug-fuelled mental breakdown in the late ’90s, to his reemergence in the new millennium as one of the leading voices in the neoreactionary movement’s Dark Enlightenment. Philosophically speaking, however, perhaps Land’s greatest claim to fame is his peculiar proposition that capitalism is AI. To be sure, he never puts it quite so straightforwardly. Rather, this is a simplification of a passage from his 1993 essay, “Machinic Desire”:

What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation.

There is much here that is beyond the scope of this short essay: from a Deleuzo-Guattarian account of machines as possessing desires and drives of their own, to a retrocausal conception of time according to which the future influences and determines the present paradoxically in advance of its own becoming. At the Incredible Machines conference held in Vancouver, Canada in 2014, Land himself fortunately condensed—microchip miniaturization style—the key claim I want to focus on: “there’s only really been one question, to be honest, that has guided everything I’ve been interested in for the last twenty years, which is: the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence.”

Until very recently, such statements tended to be the stuff of bargain-bin science fiction rather than shelved in the philosophy section. Now that the United States’ GDP growth is largely propped up by a feverish bubble of AI investment and speculation, Land’s seemingly far-fetched speculation has shown itself to be strikingly prescient. But he was actually getting at something stranger than the now vindicated, if banal prediction that some capitalist companies are inevitably going to bet their bottom dollars on AI. As he put it in a 2016 lecture, capitalism itself and AI are “basically the same thing being seen from different aspects.”

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As oddly prophetic as this proposition might seem, there are a couple of notable historical precedents. From the title of Land’s “Machinic Desire” essay, we can see that one of the most significant influences on his thought are the French philosophers—or what he calls “cyberneticists”—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In their 1972 book—or, in Land’s terms, “engineering manual”—Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly tell us that not only capitalism but more generally “the social machine” is “literally a machine, irrespective of any metaphor.”